When coach Elaine Potter went to North Bay, ON, six years ago to give a dressage clinic to some of eventer Paige Lockton’s students, she took note of one 11-year-old participant’s inherent talent. “She was one of about four young girls who blew me away with their natural feel and balance,” recalls Potter.
Madison Lawson wasn’t particularly interested in dressage then; she loved jumping. But two years later, a traumatic accident put the young rider from Bonfield in northern Ontario on a different trajectory that culminated with Lawson representing Canada at the 2010 World Equestrian Games in para-dressage at 16 years old.
Lawson started riding at age five and got her first horse, a Thoroughbred gelding called K-Low, when she was nine. She dreamed of representing Canada in show jumping. As she started competing and took up eventing, mom Nathalie, an Ontario Provincial Police dispatcher, supported her wholeheartedly. Nathalie sold her lakefront home to buy a truck and trailer and a younger horse as her daughter’s next eventing mount (Lawson’s biological father died when she was nine months old).
In June of 2007, Lawson suffered a traumatic spinal cord injury when a horse she was exercising toppled backwards onto her. Two vertebrae (L1 and T12) exploded. “I felt a sharp pain in my back and then couldn’t feel my legs,” she recalls. “I knew my back was broken. I remember lying there, screaming “I’m paralyzed! I’m never going to ride again!”
She was airlifted to the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto where she underwent a 13-hour operation to stabilize her spinal cord. Her spinal cord had been stretched like an elastic band and the diagnosis was incomplete paraplegia, because it was uncertain how much mobility she would regain.
Lawson had photos of horses plastered on her hospital room walls. When her toe on her left foot began to twitch, she believed she would walk again. Three weeks later, she was transferred to Bloorview Kids Rehab and said she wanted to walk 10 steps within the week, a goal that raised her therapist’s eyebrows. When she managed to do that, her family wept. “That’s when I knew, okay, I will ride again.”
However, “it was a long time before I could walk independently without a walker,” she says. “The first time I tried standing, it was the second most painful thing I’d ever experienced, with the accident being the first most painful.”
When Lawson got back on K-Low again in February of 2008, “it felt like home.” She started jumping the horse a month later, but after a couple of falls, “I realized it was too dangerous for my situation. My legs in general are weak. I have control of them, but they tend to do their own thing sometimes.”
Lockton, her longtime coach, suggested she try para-dressage, an idea seconded by Potter. “I told Madison “a whole new world can open for you” (as an elite athlete in para-dressage). I told her she was still the same rider in her heart and soul, that only the mechanics were different,’ said Potter, who coaches able-bodied and disabled riders.
The first order of business was finding a horse suited to para-dressage. Enter McGuire, a towering dark brown Sport Horse gelding who is now 16 years old. “I’m very thankful and lucky to have him,” says Lawson. “He’s so goofy, but he’s very smart and very kind. He is very aware of me and my body and will walk at the same pace as me. He’s an old soul.”
There are five levels of para-dressage, ranging from Grade 1A and B for the most disabled riders, to Grade 4, the level Lawson rides at. Although she can walk unassisted, some areas of her legs remain paralyzed and she relies on her toes to balance, as she has no feeling in her feet.
Lawson and McGuire made their para-dressage debut in May, 2009, and last fall were selected to ride at the World Equestrian Games. “WEG was unbelievable. It was huge, everything you can imagine,” she says. Her only regret was that the para competition didn’t get more attention. “I wish para was more out there. You hear great stories from the riders and all the struggles they’d had to go through. There was unbelievable talent there and I was just blown away by it.”
After WEG, though, Lawson had left her calendar empty. “It was probably the worst thing to do. I didn’t feel like I had any goals. It was a horrible feeling for three months. You get so high off those emotions and the adrenaline,” she says, “then you’re just sitting on the couch with nothing to do. That was big for an athlete.”
She pulled herself out of her funk and got her year mapped out. She’s been showing at Ontario gold shows and is hoping the FEI approves an international para competition in Albany, NY, this fall. “Obviously, the Paralympics are in the back of my mind, and the Pan Ams – not the ones in Guadalajara this year, as it won’t have para-dressage – but the ones in Toronto (in 2015),” says Lawson. “There’s a big push to have para-dressage and I really hope it happens.”
If para competition doesn’t happen for the 2015 Games, Lawson still has her sights set on riding there. “My horse can do Prix St. Georges, so maybe I can represent Canada as an ablebodied rider,” she suggests.
Lawson takes high school courses through independent study and plans to attend university. When she’s not at home, she and McGuire stay at Pine Ridge Farm, owned by grand prix dressage rider Gary Vander Ploeg and his wife Jeannie. Lawson trains with Potter and Vander Ploeg and bunks with Dr. Leah (Ophelia) MacDonald, another rider with a disability, who has a cottage on the Pine Ridge property.
She is focusing on perfecting her para tests this year and “just for fun” is going to try Prix St. Georges with McGuire this fall in able-bodied competition. She occasionally rides Rumble, a fourth level warmblood gelding owned by Suzanne Menzie, and may do some shows with him. Then the plan is to go to Florida for February and March in early 2012 to train with Vander Ploeg.
“For an international athlete, it’s not just rider, horse, and coach. They say it takes a village to raise a child and it takes a village to raise an athlete, too,” she says. “I’ve got Gary, Elaine, Leah, Melanie Kirkwood (who sponsored her saddle and bridle), Suzanne, obviously my mother, my grandparents, my aunt and boyfriend who support and help me so much.”
